Gossip Machine v2, Now With Z-Scores And Visual Indicators

Gossip Machine v2, Now With Z-Scores And Visual Indicators
By ResearchBuzz

I’ve made v2 of Gossip Machine and it’s about 1000% better!

I made the first version of Gossip Machine last summer. It uses Wikipedia pageview data to find days when Wikipedia articles got especially busy traffic. Those dates are then turned into single-day Google News searches.

Using past indicators of interest is an useful way to find meaningful search results about a news subject, but I was never entirely happy with the first version of Gossip Machine. The math used to calculate popularity is sloppy, there’s no indicator in the result list which days are the most busy, and it analyzes a year at a time, which doesn’t allow for closer assessment.

Curly and I kicked these problems around and made Gossip Machine v2. WOW I am pleased.

This version analyzes only a month of page views at a time. For each day it generates a z-score. Z-scores above 1 are filtered and presented in order of Z-score, with a red bar indicating how busy the page was compared to the mean for the month.

I LOVE how this works. It’s lightning fast and the red bar provides a visual indicator that’s understandable at a glance. And the Google News results are still generally good, though if the topic is too general or the page counts are too low it gives wonky results.

Now I gotta figure out how to make use of those negative z-scores…

June 12, 2023 at 07:18PM
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Canada FOI Requests, Exercise for Chronic Illness, Ballroom Photography, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, June 12, 2023

Canada FOI Requests, Exercise for Chronic Illness, Ballroom Photography, More: Monday ResearchBuzz, June 12, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Globe and Mail: How The Globe created the first national database of FOI requests. “Since the fall of 2021, we have filed more than 400 freedom-of-information (FOI) requests and spoken with more than 200 experts, all with the purpose of compiling the best resource Canada has ever seen. The result is a database of more than 300,000 FOI request summaries spanning more than 600 government and public institutions across the country.”

Western University: Researcher’s new online hub charts route to chronic disease management. “Gentle chair yoga for those with brain and spinal cord injuries, 17-minute high-intensity interval training (HIIT) for wheelchair users and simple exercises for individuals living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) are just a few examples of the physical activity resources that a newly launched online platform, My Active Ingredient, has curated and made accessible for individuals living with chronic health conditions.”

Google Blog: Pride Month 2023: See more than 1,000 rare Ballroom photos for the first time. “As we continue to celebrate Pride, we must understand the roots and impact of this culture that cultivated a Black and brown queer renaissance, which is why I’m so proud to share Ballroom in Focus on Google Arts & Culture: the largest collection of Ballroom archival material in one place. The project brings together never-before-digitized images with over 25 curated stories, coming directly from Ballroom’s leaders and icons themselves.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

ProPublica: ProPublica Adds More Than a Million New Records to Nonprofit Explorer. “ProPublica has added more than a million new tax records for tax-exempt organizations to Nonprofit Explorer, making it easier to assess the finances of charities operating across the nation.”

Engadget: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman defends API changes in AMA. “Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has finally spoken publicly about the company’s deeply unpopular API changes that have resulted in some of the most-used third-party reddit apps saying they will be forced to shut down. In an AMA (Ask Me Anything) discussion, Huffman promised improvements to Reddit’s own app, but seemed unwilling to make concessions on pricing and other issues that have rankled the community.”

USEFUL STUFF

Tom’s Hardware: How To Build an Air Quality Alert Light with Raspberry Pi Pico. “In this how to we’ll build a project that uses air quality data from the OpenWeather API to give us an indication of air quality before we leave home. The data is visualized using a Raspberry Pi Pico W, a $6 microcontroller that can go online, get the data and then display the data using a strip of NeoPixel RGB LEDs.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Search Engine Land: Google, Microsoft generative AI experiments concern advertisers. “Google and Microsoft are placing ads into AI experiments without giving brands the choice to opt out. Advertisers are now concerned that their products and services could be promoted next to inappropriate content.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ABC News: Judge in FTX bankruptcy rejects media challenge, says customer names can remain secret. “The names of individual customers of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX Trading can be permanently shielded from public disclosure, a Delaware bankruptcy judge ruled Friday.”

Bloomberg: Macron Polishes France’s AI Agenda in Meeting With Meta, Google. “French President Emmanuel Macron met with artificial intelligence experts from Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, among others, to discuss France’s role in AI research and regulation.”

Reuters: Yandex granted Nasdaq lifeline subject to Russia restructuring. “Russian internet firm Yandex on Thursday said it had been granted permission to retain its Nasdaq Stock Exchange listing provided the restructuring and divestment of its Russian business is concluded by the end of 2023.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington Post: Musk Promised Transparency, Then Hid Twitter Data. “Elon Musk is making Twitter more opaque for academics who’ve used its data for years to study social media’s impact on society, as well as those who used its database of tweets as a lens into human psychology. This is happening despite his promises to improve transparency on the platform.”

CNN: ChatGPT’s responses to suicide, addiction, sexual assault crises raise questions in new study. “When asked serious public health questions related to abuse, suicide or other medical crises, the online chatbot tool ChatGPT provided critical resources – such as what 1-800 lifeline number to call for help – only about 22% of the time in a new study.” Good morning, Internet…

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June 12, 2023 at 05:31PM
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Montana Child Care, Google Street View, Time Capsules, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 11, 2023

Montana Child Care, Google Street View, Time Capsules, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 11, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

KTVH: New website offers a resource hub for all in child care. “The Montana Child Care Business Connect Program, part of Zero to Five Montana, helps support the start, and expansion, of high-quality, early child care businesses in Montana, and they just unveiled their new online resource hub for all stakeholders in the child care industry.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Android Police: Google Street View returns to Germany after 10+ year pause due to privacy outcry . “One of the countries to shun the service early on was Germany, where privacy outcries and lawsuits led to Google halt the Street View rollout in 2011 after only covering about 20 big cities, shortly after it was launched in the country. Fast-forward to 2023, and the company is finally returning to the European country, allowing tourists and residents to explore sights and neighborhoods with up-to-date imagery.”

USEFUL STUFF

Vanderbilt Magazine: How to Make a Time Capsule. “[Tracy Denean] Sharpley-Whiting says that the grand sweep of aspirations across time is exactly what a capsule should communicate. So as she, Smith and University Librarian Jon Shaw work together to design a time capsule that will convey a message to the future university community, they share tips about how to create your own.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

AFP: Louvre Safeguarding Ukraine Art Treasures. “The Louvre in Paris is hosting 16 works of art, including 1,500-year-old Byzantine icons, from a museum in Kyiv in order to protect them from the war, it said Wednesday.”

IrishCentral: Genealogists treasure trove! More Irish community archives to go online. “The Heritage Council joins the National Museum of Ireland and participating local authorities in funding the digitization of Ireland’s community archives, through the Irish Community Archive Network (iCAN). More than 30 digital community archives created to date – and 80 to be supported by 2028.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

CNN: National Archives refutes claims Trump had two years to go through presidential records in rare public statement. “The National Archives is pushing back on claims made by former President Donald Trump, his lawyers and his allies over his retention of classified documents, for which he now faces a federal indictment. On Friday, the Archives took the rare step of releasing a public statement rebuking claims suggesting that Trump was allowed to keep classified materials under the Presidential Records Act.”

TechCrunch: US DoJ charges two Russians for hacking crypto exchange Mt. Gox. “The U.S. Department of Justice has charged two Russian nationals for hacking and causing the subsequent collapse of Mt. Gox, one of the largest and most popular crypto exchanges. In an unsealed indictment, the DoJ named Alexey Bilyuchenko, 43, and Aleksandr Verner, 29, of hacking the exchange and conspiring to launder about 647,000 bitcoins, worth about $17.2 billion today.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

News and Tribune: OUR VIEW: YouTube changes policy on false claims, but we should know better by now. “… this statement sums up what journalists have been screaming for years. You can’t trust social media to monitor posts, which means false information can spread like wildfire on platforms like YouTube. The Google-owned company concedes it will no longer remove disinformation, which is a red flag to those who value truth.”

The Verge: How Google Earth Engine revolutionized the way we monitor deforestation. “What started as an engineer’s curiosity about a logging project in California became a groundbreaking platform that allows for fast and global monitoring of forest loss.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Make: Using ChatGPT and Raspberry Pi To Build A Never Ending Story Book. “Most people will agree that the biggest and most common problem with a good story, is that it ends. This project, put together by Erin St. Blaine for Adafruit address that with the unending capabilities of ChatGPT and a Raspberry Pi.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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June 12, 2023 at 12:34AM
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Christian Chronicle, Google, Reddit, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, June 11, 2023

Christian Chronicle, Google, Reddit, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, June 11, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Christian Chronicle: Catching up on 80 years of Christian news. “as The Christian Chronicle featured someone you know? Did this newspaper ever cover a ministry or church you were a part of? What information is available about the history of evangelism in Churches of Christ? These questions — and more — can now be answered by the Chronicle’s archive.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Bloomberg: Google union pushes back on three-day return-to-office mandate. “Google employees are pushing back against the tech giant’s mandate that staffers spend at least three days a week in the office.”

The Verge: It’s not just Apollo: other Reddit apps are shutting down, too. “Apollo for Reddit isn’t the only Reddit app that’s shutting down due to the company’s new API pricing: on Thursday, rif is fun for Reddit (previously Reddit is Fun), ReddPlanet, and Sync also announced that they would be shutting down on June 30th, the same day Apollo will be.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Associated Press: Social media helps invent, then circulate info on DIY air purifiers amid wildfire smoke. “Social media users are sharing a surprisingly effective way to protect yourself indoors from the toxic wildfire smoke blanketing much of the East Coast: a box fan, four air filters and a whole lot of duct tape.”

Coda: In Hong Kong, a digital memorial of the Tiananmen Square massacre disappears. “On Tuesday, I decided to go back and look at Weiboscope, a gripping digital archive of photos, art and messages censored on social media in China for their connection with the 1989 democracy movement. But all I found was a blank page. Weiboscope — a joint project of the University of Hong Kong and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab — still has a domain, but the archive itself is gone.”

The Register: Reddit cuts five percent of workers while API pricing shift sours developers. “Social media community Reddit plans to lay off about 90 employees, amounting to about five percent of its 2,000-person staff. A company spokesperson confirmed the cuts in an email to The Register, stating that the whole company’s restructuring is part of changes to Reddit’s data, API and mod tools projects.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

PC World: Blackmailers are using AI to generate nudes from social media photos. “According to the US federal law enforcement agency, criminals are using AI-generated images to put a new spin on blackmail. They’ve been seen using publicly-posted images on social media and running them through an AI image generator to create convincing (but entirely fake) nude photos, then extorting the victims for money or real photos, in a practice the bureau is calling ‘sextortion.'”

NBC News: Minors may need parents’ permission to join social media under newly passed Louisiana bill. “Kids and teens under 18 in Louisiana may soon need their parents’ permission to sign up for online accounts, including for social media, gaming and more, under a newly passed bill in the state.”

NHPR: Sununu seeks K-12 curriculum on social media dangers. “Gov. Chris Sununu has ordered state agencies to develop curriculum that would add instruction about the dangers of social media to all K-12 health classes in New Hampshire.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Guardian: Army of fake social media accounts defend UAE presidency of climate summit. “An army of fake social media accounts on Twitter and the blogging site Medium have been promoting and defending the controversial hosting of a UN climate summit by the United Arab Emirates. The president of the Cop28 climate talks is Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the state oil giant Adnoc, which has major net zero-busting expansion plans.”

Florida International University: Have anxiety? Social media not the best source for coping advice, researchers say. “Social media can often be one of the first places people with anxiety turn for information and coping strategies. But is what they come across accurate or even helpful? While there have been several studies to understand the link between social media and anxiety — and whether more time spent on social media impacts mental health — there’s not been much work on whether social media sources can lead to a better understanding of anxiety or how to manage it.”

Yale University: Yale to launch new Center for Geospatial Solutions. “Yale will create a new Center for Geospatial Solutions (YCGS) to enhance the university’s research, training, and engagement infrastructure in the rapidly evolving areas of geospatial science, data, and analysis, university leaders have announced.” Good morning, Internet…

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June 11, 2023 at 05:29PM
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Space Agency Projects, Minecraft, Google News Showcase, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 10, 2023

Space Agency Projects, Minecraft, Google News Showcase, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, June 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs: UNOOSA and ESA launch new space solutions database linked to the Sustainable Development Goals. “The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have launched a new database listing current and past projects from space agencies in support of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

How-To Geek: Minecraft is Now Available for Your Chromebook. “It’s been a long time coming. Microsoft has been hard at work bringing Minecraft to a new platform — ChromeOS. Now, if you have a Chromebook, you can now drift away playing your favorite blocky game, as Minecraft has officially finished landing on the platform.”

PC Magazine: Google News Showcase Lands in US, Lowering Some Paywalls in the Process. “Instead of Google showing headlines and snippets of news stories and leaving it up to news sites to make money off that content (often via a display-ads market that multiple antitrust lawsuits say is twisted by Google’s exploitative conduct), Showcase has Google pay news sites directly for the right to feature those stories.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Bloomberg: Google Contract Staff That Helped Train AI Seek To Unionize. “A group of Alphabet Inc. contract workers are launching a unionization campaign, saying they need a greater voice at the company that has tasked them with work on its most high-profile products, including training generative AI answers in Google’s search engine and chatbot.”

Ars Technica: DeSantis ad uses fake AI images of Trump hugging and kissing Fauci, experts say. “A Ron DeSantis campaign video shows three pictures of Donald Trump hugging and kissing Anthony Fauci, all of which seem to be fake images generated by artificial intelligence. One professor told Ars today that there is ‘no doubt’ the ad uses fake AI images.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Slashgear: Ring Employees’ Camera-Peeping Shows The Terrifying Downside Of Home Security Tech. “On May 31, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission issued a frightening proposal detailing some abuses of Ring technology by employees. The District of Columbia District Court noted in a filed complaint that ‘customers routinely use Ring’s indoor cameras as baby monitors and to monitor private spaces of the home, including adults’ bedrooms, children’s bedrooms, and bathrooms,’ and, it seems, this most personal footage has been accessed without some users’ knowledge.”

Wall Street Journal: 32 YouTube Videos Cited as Court Is Asked to Ban ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ Protest Anthem. “Government officials in the financial center are seeking a court order to block the dissemination online of a popular pro-democracy song, the first major legal challenge to U.S. tech companies such as Google over politically sensitive content on their platforms.”

New York Times: The ChatGPT Lawyer Explains Himself. “For nearly two hours Thursday, Mr. Schwartz was grilled by a judge in a hearing ordered after the disclosure that the lawyer had created a legal brief for a case in Federal District Court that was filled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations, all generated by ChatGPT. The judge, P. Kevin Castel, said he would now consider whether to impose sanctions on Mr. Schwartz and his partner, Peter LoDuca, whose name was on the brief.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

CNBC: Google Cloud is partnering with Mayo Clinic as it tries to expand use of generative A.I. in health care. “On Wednesday, Google Cloud said Mayo Clinic is testing a new service called Enterprise Search on Generative AI App Builder, which was introduced Tuesday. The tool effectively lets clients create their own chatbots using Google’s technology to scour mounds of disparate internal data.”

MIT Technology Review: Google DeepMind’s game-playing AI just found another way to make code faster . “DeepMind’s run of discoveries in fundamental computer science continues. Last year the company used a version of its game-playing AI AlphaZero to find new ways to speed up the calculation of a crucial piece of math at the heart of many different kinds of code, beating a 50-year-old record. Now it has pulled the same trick again—twice.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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June 11, 2023 at 12:31AM
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Quickly Generate Several Date-Bounded Google News Searches For One Topic: Google News Timeline Template

Quickly Generate Several Date-Bounded Google News Searches For One Topic: Google News Timeline Template
By ResearchBuzz

I’m still thinking about search engines and searching as I always do, but there has been so much news the last couple of days about The Indictment that I’ve been thinking about searching that.

The indictment is fairly long and mentions several time spans and specific dates. As I was reading through it, I started wondering about external news context for the events in the indictment. People and events related to this indictment have been very much in the public eye, and coverage of that has been occurring in parallel with the secret things that were alleged to be happening. I wanted a way to be able to review all those dates and that topic through a Google News search lens without lots of typing.

So I made Google News Timeline Template!

Enter the Google News search query you want to run and a series of date spans separated by commas. GNTT will turn that query and those dates into a series of Google News search links which open in a new tab.

I must say testing this was very interesting. The indictment alleges that boxes were being moved around Mar A Lago in April 2021. Of course when I run a Google News search for that topic in that same time period, boxes full of classified documents are not mentioned. But events happening at Mar A Lago are.

In addition to time spans, the indictment also mentions specific dates, like July 21, 2021. At that date it is alleged that classified documents were shown to people who should not have seen them. Again, doing a Google News search around that time period is not going to find that incident. But what’s this about the security of nuclear footballs, in news stories that were published about the same time? Yikes.

I’ve been playing around a lot with how date-bounded searches can provide context to more general information. This is the first time I’ve applied that thinking to situations where there is a known layer and an unknown layer. Since both layers occurred in physical space, you can apply contextual boundaries to both and then compare them. I wonder what we will find?

 

June 10, 2023 at 05:50PM
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Pennsylvania Veterans, Luxembourg Real Estate, JPEG XL, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, June 10, 2023

Pennsylvania Veterans, Luxembourg Real Estate, JPEG XL, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, June 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Government of Pennsylvania: Shapiro Administration Launches Online Resource For Service Members Leaving Active Duty, Returning To Pennsylvania. “Today, the Shapiro Administration announced the launch of, ‘Welcome Home PA,’ an online resource to help service members separating or retiring from active duty acclimate to a successful civilian life in Pennsylvania. The new website includes information about employment and licensing, education, securing military paperwork, veteran crisis and much more.”

Delano: Luxembourg real estate calculator and mortgage simulator . “Luxdata, a data analytics platform in Luxembourg, has partnered with Delano and Paperjam to produce a series of data dashboards on the grand duchy’s housing market ahead of this year’s elections.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Register: Google snubbed JPEG XL so of course Apple now supports it in Safari. “Apple is now supporting JPEG XL – a novel royalty-free image codec that Google last year controversially abandoned – in its Safari browser. The Safari 17 Beta Release Notes reveal that support for JPEG XL has been added, bringing with it various purported advantages over other image compression and decompression technologies.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Wall Street Journal: Google Gets Stricter About Employees’ Time in Office. “Google will consider office attendance records in performance reviews and send reminders to employees with frequent absences, becoming the latest company to urge a return to in-person collaboration following an embrace of remote work during the pandemic.”

CNBC: Google tells employees in New York and along the East Coast to work from home as wildfire smoke fills the air. “According to NBC, the company issued advisory notices to workers in the Detroit area; Washington, D.C.; Reston, Virginia; Pittsburgh; and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. In Canada, which is on track to experience its worst-ever wildfire season, Google notified employees in the Ontario cities of Toronto and Waterloo.”

Kotaku: Twitch’s New Ad Rules Are Very Bad For Streamers [Update]. “On June 6, popular streaming service Twitch rolled out a set of new advertisement rules that spell trouble for streamers large and small. The rules are directly related to branded content streamers add into their streams, which are a crucial source of revenue for creators, and the new set of rules could very well mean major consequences for your favorite streamers.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Toronto Star: Justin Trudeau shows no interest in compromising with Meta, Google over online news bill. “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is showing no interest in compromising with Meta and Google over a proposed law that would make them pay for Canadian journalism that helps tech companies generate revenue.”

Associated Press: Pa. House passes bill to require electronically filed campaign finance reports. “Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives approved legislation Tuesday to require candidates for a state office to file their campaign finance reports electronically, instead of on paper.”

SEC: SEC Charges Coinbase for Operating as an Unregistered Securities Exchange, Broker, and Clearing Agency. “The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Coinbase, Inc. with operating its crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency. The SEC also charged Coinbase for failing to register the offer and sale of its crypto asset staking-as-a-service program.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

WIRED: How to Leave a Platform When the Party’s Over. “Elon Musk’s ownership has sent some users in search of new alternatives, drab recreations of the original product. But a fresh URL will not solve the many problems of the financialized internet, nor can it fix the habits of fractured communication drilled into us by years of tweeting, subtweeting, dunking, lurking, and shitposting.”

El País: Kicking toxic people off social media reduces hate speech on the internet. “An internal study by Facebook, which analyzed interactions between 26,000 users, reveals that excluding extremist community leaders is an effective means of eradicating hate speech on social media, particularly over the long term.”

Purdue University: AI-driven mobile health algorithm uses phone camera to detect blood vessel oxygen levels . “You may already use your smartphone for remote medical appointments. Why not use some of the onboard sensors to gather medical data? That’s the idea behind AI-driven technology developed at Purdue University that could use a smartphone camera to detect and diagnose medical conditions like anemia faster and more accurately than highly specialized medical equipment being developed for the task.” Good morning, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. Check out Search Gizmos when you have a minute.

June 10, 2023 at 05:28PM
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